Tegami Bachi Reverse Episode #28 Anime Review

After making a delivery to Ray Attlee, the owner of a rather large
mansion, Lag is asked by Ray to try and trace the sender of a
picture-letter that he's received. According to Ray, the pictures in
the letter remind her of her hometown, and the memories they trigger
have given her the will to fight the long illness she's been suffering.
Lag decides to try and find the sender without resorting to his Shindan
- which turns out to be a little easier than he was expecting - but
Ray's head housekeeper, Colbasso, is trying to take credit for the
picture letters herself...

I'm still waiting and hoping that Lag
will get down to the search for Gauche without wasting too much time -
but for this episode at least I'm not going to get my wish. Apart from a
brief bit of wishful thinking towards the beginning of the episode,
Gauche isn't touched upon - instead, the focus is on Lag's search for
someone a lot closer to home: the sender of the picture-letters that Ray
has been receiving. I'd call them postcards, personally, but then I'm
not the translator.

There are really three main players in the
story, apart from Lag and Niche: Ray herself, suffering a long illness
and separated from her parents after they were summoned to the capital
after the Day of Flicker (sound like someone else we know?); Colbasso,
Ray's chief housekeeper, who comes across as a supremely selfish and
greedy person with little regard for others; and Kimidori, a
larger-than-average maid whose clumsiness matches her size and who's on
the receiving end of some rather nasty treatment by Colbasso.

Lag's
search for the sender of the picture-letters doesn't actually take very
long, and brings me to my main gripe with the episode: the way the
characters are introduced and the story set up makes it very clear how
events are going to unfold - you can predict five minutes into the
episode how it's going to unfold, and lo the rest of the episode unfolds
by-the-numbers in a very predictable way. I like surprises, when
they've been properly foreshadowed, and this level of predictability
bugs me somewhat, so for that reason alone this episode was struggling
to impress me.

Ray herself also seems to be less of a personality
than she could be. Perhaps through lack of time to do much with her,
she feels unnaturally single-minded and focussed on finding her
mysterious correspondent, and that limits her appeal.